


The Fruit of the Tree

by RaspberryHeaven



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: "The schools were less pleasant than today's schools", Book: The Magician's Nephew, Bullying, But magic is still real, Gen, Real world, Some dangers are not magical, eternal friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 13:19:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7936267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaspberryHeaven/pseuds/RaspberryHeaven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about Polly and Digory, unpleasant schools, and lasting friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fruit of the Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/gifts).



> _Dear Polly,_
> 
> _I hope your holidays have been as jolly as mine. Mother is doing awfully well, and she’s started to go for long walks with me, just slowly, you know. Mostly it’s farms, but there is a forest, and even though the trees are old, it all feels new somehow. I suppose that sounds like rot, but the grass and flowers remind me of_ there, _somehow. I wish you could visit. Other people don’t understand._
> 
> _I hate the thought of going away to a new school, but I’m looking forward to making new friends. You’re so lucky, going to a day school and still seeing your Mother every evening. Tell me all about what it’s like._

Mary didn’t look much like Jadis. She was small and plump, with rounded cheeks kissed with the faint flush of apple blossom, and golden curls. Everyone thought she was terribly sweet, and from such a good family. There was nothing to explain the way that, the first time Polly looked into Mary’s melting blue eyes, she felt like Charn was crumbling around her.

Polly was not the type of girl to ring forbidden bells. So when the other girls did Mary’s darning, quarrelled over who paired with her for walks or called her their Queen—another chilling moment—Polly held aloof. When Mary, nettled, singled Polly out for favour and tried to add her to her admirers, Polly turned away from her to concentrate on her books.

“That stuck up Polly Plummer,” Mary said to Phillipa, who had watery green eyes and a rich family, and was Games captain. Polly was fairly sure they both knew she could hear, and her cheeks flamed as she bent over her books.“Thinks she’s so much better than us. But who is she? Her family is nothing. _We_ don’t know her.”

After a while, no one walked with Polly. She was an excellent bat, but somehow Phillipa never selected her for the Eleven. She had no lines in the school play. No one sought her out for secrets and confessions. No one sat with her when she curled up under the one sad, green tree in the yard and busied her hands with her needlework or her eyes with a book. Sometimes, her work was spoiled with smudges of ink she was sure she did not remember spilling. Once, she lost her ribbon, and when she found it, it was shredded into pieces. She gathered up the pieces carefully and shoved them in her pocket.

Polly thought of iron bars and waxworks and puddles. She spent her evenings in the attic, with books instead of with Digory’s grubby presence. She became quiet and sullen, and waited for the holidays and her escape from silly girls.

> _I’m sorry you could't come down for the hols, but I understand. We’re coming up for London for the day on Wednesday, to go to the Zoo. I don’t suppose your folks would bring you as well?_

“Girls are silly,” said Digory.

Polly felt her spine stiffen. She had thought the same herself, many times, the last term, but it was unbearable that a boy should say so. She leaned forward and fixed her eyes on the solitary Hippo, slumbering in front of her in its pathetic enclosure. He had been born in the Zoo, and never rolled in the mud on the banks of the Nile.

“I’m sorry to be so silly,” she said, coldly.

“That’s not what I mean.” Digory kicked his heels. “Say, why do you think they call him Guy Fawkes? He doesn’t look like he could set fire to anything. Poor old thing.”

“I have no idea.” Her tones were still cold, and he picked up on it. 

“Look, let’s go. I used to like coming to London to the Zoo, but I hate it now, somehow. I thought it would remind me of Narnia, seeing all the animals, but it’s beastly. After…”

After Talking Beasts, and endless green, and endless space and young air. Poly slipped her hand into his, and they pressed through the crowd to find somewhere with grass and trees. Shaking off your families to meet up in the Zoo didn’t seem quite enough.

“It’s better in the country. It makes up for things, somehow. I wish you didn’t have to live in this beastly city and could come live by me.” Digory said. He smiled at Polly, and she accepted the unspoken apology. His face was thinner than she had expected,. “I just can’t see how some silly girl reminds you of—her—just because she gets other girls to fag for her.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense.” She pressed her gloved hands together. “Maybe I just want to remember. Sometimes it feels like all this, the dirt and the sun and the tiresomeness, is just a bad dream, and Narnia is the only real thing. But sometimes—“

“Maybe dreams are more real than things that are really real.”

“Yes.”

They sat there together for a while, watching the crowds move and talk, like jabbering parrots. Just two friends at the Zoo. How could they feel so apart from it all?

“I’m sorry you’re having a bad time at school,” Digory said at last.

She thought of what he’d told her about his boarding school, about the cold and the bad food and the _bruises_ , and that he had never snivelled when telling her, not even once. And at least she only went to a day school, and wasn’t stuck in a dormitory with Mary and Phillipa. Here she was making a fuss because she didn’t get to play cricket. Perhaps girls really were weak.

“Oh, girls have it easy,” she said, lightly. “Come on. Let’s go to the Giraffe House, and make pretend we can set them free to run and run.”

Before she went home to her row of houses, and he went to take the long train ride back to the country, she gave him some apples she had taken from her satchel. He hesitated, then hugged her tight, his cheek against hers.

“Oh, don’t be soppy,” she said, colouring with pleasure. They shook hands, and he left.

“Well, that’s all very well,” she said to herself, “but it rather leaves me back where I was.”

>   
>  _Dear Digory,_
> 
> _Sometimes I think of everything we’ve been through, and I just get so angry with other girls. They don’t seem to understand what_ matters. _They make the simplest things into such a stupid fuss._

“…holding hands. And _embracing._ ” Phillipa was whispering, but her voice carried across the classroom the moment the mistress left the room. There was a rustle of girls lifting their heads slightly, changing position, the better to hear without seeming to eavesdrop. 

“But surely, her parents?” Mary’s voice was shocked. 

“Nowhere to be seen. They must have given them the slip.” A deep, virtuous sigh. “I was shocked.”

Surely it was a coincidence. Nothing at all to do with Polly, bent studiously over her work, trying not to listen. But she could feel her cheeks become hot, little prickles of heat making their way down her neck, and maybe the prickles were of all the eyes turning to stare at her. She jabbed her pen against the page, writing so hard that she almost cut the exercise book.

“Of course you were. I don't think that’s quite nice.” May wasn’t whispering, Her voice was clear and firm, addressing the classroom, not just her friend “But then, she isn’t quite a nice girl, is she? I always knew that. Stuck up, but I fancy she doesn’t wash behind her ears.”

“She’s always writing to some boy, too. Not a brother. Digory someone.” Dorita joining eagerly in. “Maybe it’s him.”

Polly wasn’t going to cry. There was hotness at the corners of her eyes, but there was no way the tears were going to spill over and give Mary the pleasure of seeing her cry.

“I say we don’t associate with her at all,” Mary declared. “We don’t want to give the school a bad name.”

“You didn’t associate with me anyway,” Polly said, and regretted it instantly. She had wanted to sound coolly defiant, but her voice broke and the threatening tears were audible. For a moment she wanted to break and run from the class, but the mistress was returning and there was nothing to do but go on with her sums and try not to cry.

Once she collected herself a little, Mary was smiling at her, smiling with a hard, cruel smile on her beautiful face that was terribly familiar.

>   
>  _Dear Polly,_
> 
> _You haven’t written for a long time. Is something up?_
> 
> _Sometimes I think we were meant to learn things there that would help us now, but I forget it in the beastliness of everything. Don’t let me forget, Pol. Keep writing to me._

Polly crossed the courtyard, holding her book. It always seemed like an ordeal, every play time, trying to remain dignified, and uncaring. It took all her effort and courage, and it was so hard not to collapse like a limp rag once she reached her seat and could pretend to read, while dreaming of Narnia. 

If only she had stayed there. But… Mother… Mother who had asked her last night, with tears in her eyes, if she was feeling quite well, and wouldn't she eat more, please. Polly didn’t want to leave Mother.

Digory would understand that.

It was a while before she was conscious of two voices, one hard and cool, one sniffling and blubbing.

“It wasn’t my fault, Mary. I had a headache, and I did my best—”

“And now I have to do it over!” Mary couldn’t possibly know anyone could hear her. Her voice held no sweetness now. It lashed like a whip.

“I’ll do it—“ Phillipa’s voice rose in a wail.

“With Miss Peacham watching me, you stupid girl! I don’t know why I put up with you.”

Mary flung herself past Polly as if she wasn’t there. Not that this was unusual, but this seemed less like Coventry and more like being too furious to notice.

Polly sat under the tree and listened to the sobbing. She thought of stone waste and wind and waxworks, and that Jadis had killed all her own supporters with the Last Word.

She stood, and walked around the corner. Phillipa was crying messily into a damp and not very clean handkerchief. Polly reached into her own pocket for hers, and her fingers brushed the shreds of her ribbon. Polly was a wonderful bat, really very good, and Phillipa had chosen Eunice, who was quite useless, for the Eleven .

Polly looked up, and

> the space and distance between them melted. Digory was holding out his arm to a boy with a ruler, and the ruler cracked down on his arm once, twice.
> 
> Digory grabbed the ruler, pulled it back, and snapped it. The bigger boy hitting him reeled back in surprise, and Digory lifted his hand, curled into a fist, to strike— 
> 
> His face lifted, pale and big-eyed, and he stared into Polly’s eyes. Polly had the distinct sense that she heard a lion roaring. 
> 
> He lowered his hand. 
> 
> “I won’t lower myself by beating you. But don’t strike me again,” he said, his voice cold. “I’ll fag for you—that’s my job. But if you hit me or the younger boys again, I will fight you. I might be half your size, but I’ll win.” He turned away from the boy, just slightly, and his hard expression changed, and he smiled at Polly. Just a little.

pulled the handkerchief from her pocket.

“Here. Take it.”

Philip looked up at her with red, bleary eyes and failed to extend her hand. Polly tossed the handkerchief onto her lap.

“I don't suppose you can accept my help, right now. But if you do—if you get tired of Mary and her games—I’ll be your friend. Just so you know.”

“Mary—“

Polly laughed, and her heart was singing. “Mary is just a silly schoolgirl. Not a Queen. She can’t hurt anything that _really_ matters. As long as you have one real friend, you can face anything.”

She turned way, to give Phillipa a little peace and dignity. She had a letter to write.

>   
>  _Dear Digory,_
> 
> _No matter what, no matter if we don’t see each other for years, even if we grow up and marry other people and have children or anything that happens to us, let’s always be friends and help each other. Let’s always remember._

>   
>  _Dear Polly,_
> 
> _Always._


End file.
